The title of this work is a line borrowed directly from Korean American novelist R.O. Kwon’s Vanity Fair article, “A Letter to My Fellow Asian Women Whose Hearts Are Still Breaking,” published in 2021 in the wake of the Atlanta Shootings. 

In navigating my own experience as an Asian American in a racialized, sexualized, gendered body, I am drawn with increasing urgency to history, exploring the ways in which the anti-Asian racism and violence we see now is neither new nor unexpected. Rooted firmly in the dirt of white supremacy and empire, how little our present moment feels malleable. 

Approaching centuries of invisibility and sexualized hypervisibility feels like an impossible task to begin. But when my co-artist, Monik Flores, came to me with this idea, it broke something open. The act of collaboration is essential to what we hope to say and do. To work in co-creation with another woman of color, someone who also lives within particular marginalizations, is to threaten the ways in which whiteness would strive to divide us. To combine vision and voice is an act of trust and solidarity. There is a further kind of merging in that some of its poetic text is assembled using language from preexisting texts (in this case, news articles) I combined and rearranged. 

The tensions I initially imagined between joy and grief/anger felt so falsely binary and overly-constructed to me, that in the end, the project’s tone, much like its hybrid form, ended up being both and neither. I hope this complexity of emotion and loudness of existence interrupts silence. I hope it disrupts stereotypes. And I hope it amplifies our pride in and care for each other.  													—MK

A note on inconvenience: In engaging this work, we want people to be forced to confront the presence of these photo-poems when they are installed (whether that be ducking, walking around, etc.). Some of the text on the images are also less legible than others. They require the viewer to stop and look more closely. The pervading silence around anti-Asian violence in this way is subverted on a very physical level, as the images impose themselves in the middle of people’s routines. —MF